The 17th annual Women in the Director’s Chair International Film & Video Festival, featuring narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental works by women, runs Friday through Sunday, March 20 through 22, and next weekend. Screenings are at DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl.; Hothouse, 31 E. Balbo; Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson; and Calles y Sue–os, 1900 S. Carpenter. Tickets are $7, $5 for students, seniors with a valid ID, and members of Women in the Director’s Chair; festival passes are also available. For more information call 773-281-4988.
I Stare at You
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Susan Mogul’s hour-long 1997 video I Stare at You and Dream is a personal documentary about her friends in Highland Park, a mostly Latino neighborhood in LA. On the same program, videos by Meredith E. Holch and Kathleen O’Shea. (Hothouse, 9:00)
Living History
Helena Appio’s piquant 1997 short, A Portrait of Mr. Pink, encourages its subject, Brenton Samuel Pink, to contradict himself when he observes that youth is the best time of life. At 73 he projects an expansive enjoyment while showing us around his spectacularly idiosyncratic home in Britain, demonstrating how he’s lovingly crafted the environment to evoke his native Jamaica. An early scene showing another man offering to buy the house is gently humorous; because it occurs before we know the extent of Pink’s commitment to the place, its meaning resonates retroactively. Yuko Edwards’s Politics From a Black Woman’s Insides (1997) emphasizes personal narratives as it scrutinizes cultural iconography and examines the experiences of women who’ve struggled with the health-care system. Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio’s Two or Three Things but Nothing for Sure (1996) is a portrait of writer Dorothy Allison. In Lydia Ann Douglas’s Nappy (1997), 14 women who’ve decided to stop straightening their hair discuss the criticism that act inspired. In Kimberly Saree Tomes’s Looking for Wendy (1997) interracial adoption and biotechnology are elements in an exploration of notions of culture and identity. (LA) (DuSable Museum, 4:00)
Quests: New Lesbian Work, Part I
Journeys Home
